ASHTABULA — Saybrook Township trustee Robert Brobst charges former Ashtabula city solicitor Thomas Simon is responsible for the loss of the JEDD on the high school property on Sanborn Road.
The issue arose last week in a letter from local developer Ronald Kister addressed to Simon. Kister was responding to the city, which Simon represents in its offer to buy Kister’s Wade Avenue property. The blistering letter bawled out Simon for interfering with the school board’s business, and for quashing a joint economic development district (JEDD) back in 2002, which would have
encompassed new schools on Sanborn Road.
In the letter, Kister said the JEDD was an economic development tool supported by Growth Partnership for Ashtabula County and the Ashtabula Area Chamber of Commerce, which would have produced about $100,000 a year in additional income-tax revenues for the city.
Simon denied the accusations, but Brobst said Tuesday that Simon was responsible for scuttling the JEDD.
“Before the election, (Saybrook) township and the (Ashtabula) school board were in favor of the JEDD, and at the 11th hour, city council turned it down,” Brobst said. “(Simon) doesn’t have his facts right; he talks just to hear his head roar.”
Simon has said the school board lost interest in the JEDD once the $44 million school bond issue passed in May 2002.
“The school board backed out of the JEDD because it was concerned the school-system employees working on the campus in Saybrook Township would be upset because they would be required to pay city income tax,” Simon said.
Former city council vice president Josephine Misener said Tuesday the school board pulled out because of Simon. She knows this because she was there, she said.
Misener recounts: “Attorney Mark Andrews, who was representing the school board, slid his chair back, closed his notebook and said: ‘The school board is no longer interested in negotiating with the city, because the city is not negotiating in good faith. Tom Simon is campaigning against the levy.’
“This was before the election; the levy had not passed. Tom Simon was trying to negotiate a deal, while campaigning against the levy. That was it.
“To them, it was a conflict,” Misener said.
On Monday, the school board gave up its plan to build campus-style elementary schools on Wade Avenue after the owners of one parcel of property more than doubled their asking price. The price hike came after city council bid on the same parcel, knowing the school board needed it to build a new-school campus on Wade Avenue.
Simon, who supports the construction of neighborhood schools, denies charges that council purposely derailed the school board.
During former city manager August Pugliese’s administration, the city acquired a single acre of vacant land on the north side of Wade Avenue for about $25,000, with the intention of annexing the property and developing it into a high-tech business park, he said. So, it’s ludicrous to say council bid on the property with no plans to build a business park, Simon said.
Misener said she was on council in 2004, and there was “never ever” any talk of a high-tech business park. She said the purchase was to give the city access to the property.
“It’s all Simon’s hullabaloo,” she said.
Brobst charges the “constant bickering” between the city and school board is detrimental to the city, and even the entire county.
The Saybrook Township trustees will help the school board find suitable property to build the elementary schools, he said.
“I will continue to support the schools, no matter where they are built,” he said. “We have to get going. I hope we don’t lose the opportunity to have new schools.”
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